Story Highlights

People have been taking pictures of themselves and finding ways to alter them for years, stretching the photo to make themselves look taller and thinner with Microsoft Paint and, later, Adobe Photoshop. A new app aims to level the playing field of the look-thinner game by making it easier than ever.

SkinneePix "helps you edit your selfies to look 5, 10 or 15 pounds skinnier in two quick clicks on your iPhone," according to its description in the iTunes store. It was developed by Susan Green and Robin J. Phillips of Pretty Smart Women in Phoenix. They worked with Tempe app developers Dezapp to create it.

Sure, 15 pounds on one person's frame would be much harder to fudge than on another's, but the promise of a more flattering photo for the price of the 99-cent app is enough to grab some attention.

"It was sparked because friends and family would always say, 'Use the skinny lens' " as a joke, Phillips said. "We ended up making the skinny lens, but ... it's not like a big Photoshop thing, it's not altering peoples face to put on national magazines. This is more of personal exploration of how you look and how you feel."

There are similar slimming apps on the market, but they tend to either be tedious to use, with detailed processes designed to give you Kardashian curves, or they're more like a fun-house mirror, Phillips said. SkinneePix is in between the two.

The app lets you take a photo with either the front- or rear-facing camera, as well as import one already on your camera roll, then uses facial-detection software; the app only shaves from the face and not the whole body. A bar pops up under the photo with four options: 0, 5, 10 and 15 pounds. In practice, each increment seems to shave width off the lower half of the face.

Because it works by essentially sucking in your cheeks, thinner faces may appear too gaunt when they're down 15 pounds. And forget group selfies — it only works on a singleton. Users have complained in online reviews that the app crashes frequently, especially if the photo is anything but a straight-on photo of just a face.

The simple act of slimming a face-only selfie has sparked international buzz. The app became available in the iTunes store on March 11, and in the last week it's garnered attention from the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail and more, many of which are calling it out as vain or saying it promotes unrealistic standards of beauty.

"We intentionally have not done a body ... we didn't want it to make a person look distorted or emaciated," Phillips said. "We recognize in some people there are issues, people have concerns about their weight, and I know some people can have a real problem with that and body image is a very serious thing.

"This gives you the quick kind of realistic, real-time image of how you might look if you keep fit."

Phillips said it's not cartoonlike or "gameified," it's just a slightly slimmer version of your real self.

Despite criticism, the app is being downloaded thousands of times a day and used up to 40,000 times a day, Phillips said, and she keeps hearing from customers that it's more inspirational than embarrassing.

"Some are saying, 'This could help motivate me,' others see it as fun," she said. "People come up and joke about when we're going to roll out the 'skinny gut' or 'skinny butt.' "